Factories and industrial places of business are significantly becoming safer places for workers. As science and knowledge progress, it becomes known that certain repetitive motions by a human worker may cause a chronic injury and may eventually disable the worker. As such, workers must limit the particular activity during the day or the job needs to be changed in a fashion to make the operation more ergonomically friendly by reducing or eliminating the harmful motion.
Cable is a particularly difficult material to handle. In this application, “cable” is used in a generic sense and can range from thin wire to sheathed insulated wire, stiff rope, or wire bundles, metallic ribbon strips, flexible tubing or even elongated flexible non-circular shaped material such as flexible plastic molding trim. Cable may be bundled in large diameter windings with many coils that need to be continuously controlled to prevent the cable from undesirably uncoiling which can at the very least undesirably take up space and make a mess. On many occasions, when large bulk shipments of coil are brought in, the cable needs to be rewound and repackaged in smaller amounts.
The repackaging of cable has presently been manually intensive with human workers manually coiling the cable into a box or other container. This manual operation requires a repetitive circular motion of the worker's arm where it connects to the shoulder. Excessive repetitive circular motion of this nature may possibly cause a strain on the shoulder. Thus it is preferred to make this operation more ergonomically friendly by eliminating this circular motion in such a cable re-packaging operation.
What is needed is a rotating platform that can rotate the container and hold it in place while the cable is fed into the container. What is also needed is a rotatable connection that provides a vacuum therethrough to retain the container on a platform via vacuum suction.